Month: January 2013

Our current web service at the /ws/2 endpoint returns too much data in a lot of cases and in many cases we suspect that the programs making the calls to the service don’t actually consume all of that data. We’d like to reduce the amount of unused data our web service returns, in order to reduce our bandwidth costs. We propose that:

The web service will no longer includes aliases and tags in relation elements. Regardless of what entity you may request, if the results of your request includes a relation element, any alias or tag elements that are currently returned will no longer be returned.

The web service no longer includes aliases and tags in for the Various Artists artist anywhere, unless you specifically request the Various Artist from the /ws/2/artist endpoint.

We think that this will have a minimal impact on our web service users. If you use our web service, please tell us what you think about this. If you know someone who is using our web service, but may not read this blog, please forward a link to this post to them.

For more background on our research into this topic, please take a look at this document.

We’ve just finished releasing the last release for January, 2013. This release is a combination of bug fixes and improvements to existing features, and was worked on by Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Michael Wiencek, Nicolás Tamargo, Pavan Chander and the rest of the MusicBrainz team. Thanks for your hard work, everyone! Here’s what’s changed:

Recently we’ve received two bug reports that point out two inconsistencies in our privacy policy:

MBS-5708: It’s not possible to disable the display of cover art but the privacy policy claims it is. There are two possible options for fixing this; fix the privacy policy or make a new preference. Which would you prefer?

MBS-5709: Inclusion of Google Analytics is in violation of the privacy policy. This one is more tricky, since we link to other third parties (archive.org, gravatar, captcha) that are also not mentioned in the policy. And changing the policy for each time we add a new third party becomes cumbersome. No clear solutions have formed around this issue, so we would like your feedback on this.

If you care about our privacy policy, please take a moment to read these bugs and comment on them. Thanks!

7digital enables a lot of digital music stores and provides a lot of services for mobile operators. 7digital has relationships with many labels and thus faces complex metadata issues. I’m quite pleased that 7digital has chosen to partner with MusicBrainz to fix these metadata issues.

The Echo Nest provides tons of digital music services and is a driving force behind Music Hack Days here in the States. The Echo Nest also created project Rosetta Stone, a service that translates to/from MusicBrainz IDs from/to other ID spaces like the Echo Nest IDs or Rdio IDs.

On February 11th 2013, we will be shutting down the MusicBrainz hosted Git repository, in favour of using GitHub for hosting. While we will continue to take backups, these will be internal and thus git.musicbrainz.org will cease to operate as it currently does.

There are a few reasons for this move, but the predominent reason is so MusicBrainz can host less. We currently host a lot of our own software and this is straining the already-limited resources we have. If someone else can do something just as well or better than we can – then let them! Using GitHub also means we get a slightly better repository browser, which can make communicating and discussing code easier. However, we are not moving to pull requests, though we may in the future.

We already mirror git.musicbrainz.org onto GitHub, so if you are only interested in read access, we recommend changing your local clone now, to save confusion in the future. To do this:

After delaying this release by a week due to Christmas/New Year getting in the way, we have pushed out a new update of the MusicBrainz web site. This release consists mostly of bug fixes and a few outstanding tasks that we still needed to complete. Thanks to Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Michael Wiencek, Johannes Weißl and the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release! Here’s what’s changed:

Aaron Swartz has spent most of life working to improve the Internet and to preserve freedom on the net. Many people are speaking to his awesome accomplishments in the last 10 years of his life, but I’d like to take a minute and reflect on his earlier years.

I was one of the fortunate people who met Aaron when he was still 15 — we first met up in Washington DC for O’Reilly’s P2P conference. Since he was a minor, his mom was accompanying him. Never mind that she had a broken leg at the time — she was so dedicated to her son that she traveled with him to allow him to participate in things that most minors couldn’t even imagine.

Before I met him in person, Aaron was an active contributor to MusicBrainz. When I started my first mis-guided attempts to create an RDF based web-service, he worked with me to improve the schema. He helped me understand RDF (damn that RDF spec!) and helped me fix the schema until it actually worked properly. Aaron was always looking for new and interesting things to do, so once his mission with MusicBrainz was done, he moved on to bigger and better things. And the things he did — simply amazing that one person can accomplish so much in so little time.

Aaron and I shared one passion — making data open and accessible. His means were always more aggressive than mine; he often chose the faster, more risky approach. I usually favor the slow-and-steady-will-win approach. Regardless, the events that led up to his suicide leave me deeply unsettled about the current state of affairs.

Aaron, thank you for being the instigator, shit-stirrer, advocate and dissident you were. I appreciate everything you’ve done during your short stay here in this troubled planet. May your next journey be more peaceful!